Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is the great Gareth Porter.
He's an independent historian and journalist, writes for Interpress Service at IPSNews.net.
We reprint virtually every bit of it, I believe, at AntiWar.com/Porter.
And, of course, we interview him on this show about every one of them.
Welcome back, Gareth.
How's things?
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to you, Scott.
I'm fine, thanks.
Good, good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
So, your latest piece is called How Afghanistan Became a War for NATO.
Very interesting news analysis here.
Go ahead.
Give us the lowdown.
My editor pointed out that there's a nice kind of double entendre possible in reading the headline, which is that, on one hand, the story is about how the United States maneuvered and manipulated to hand over responsibility for security, quote-unquote, in Afghanistan to NATO, thus making it a war for NATO.
And at the same time, it's kind of been a war internally within NATO between those forces that really wanted to go full bore into combat, which was mainly the United States.
Was that Jim Loeb who noticed that?
No, no.
I'm talking about the editor who actually edited this piece.
Oh, I was going to say, that guy's got a sharp eye.
No, no.
This was a nice point that she made.
The title was a double entendre, despite the fact that I hadn't realized it at the time.
Right.
I think I took it the way you meant it originally, that this is a war on behalf of somehow, what, making NATO seem legitimate?
Yeah, I mean, really what I'm trying to convey here is that there are self-interested bureaucrats within the U.S. Department of Defense, people who were associated with NATO, whose jobs involved NATO interests, and the U.S. and other bureaucrats within NATO, that is particularly General James L. Jones, who was Supreme Allied Commander in NATO, the commander of all NATO forces during this crucial period from 2003 to 2006.
All those forces, those self-interested forces, were interested in finding a new mission for NATO.
The reason is because, of course, NATO was floundering once the Soviet Union had disappeared, and the Warsaw Pact had dissolved.
They really didn't have any obvious reason for existence.
And this was a serious political problem for NATO.
And General Jones and others in the Pentagon who were concerned with NATO, whose jobs involved NATO, wanted to find a new mission for NATO.
And Afghanistan presented itself, or it seemed to present itself, as a kind of easy target.
Once the Taliban was overthrown, the Taliban regime was overthrown in 2001, we thought they were on the run, that they wouldn't be able to come back, and therefore we could just have NATO come in and kind of mop up and do reconstruction.
And that would be a nice little fillip for all those folks who were NATO bureaucrats or NATO-related officials.
But, of course, the storyline didn't quite turn out that way.
Well, you know, it's funny, this guy James Jones was the same guy who, at one point, they said proposed having NATO occupy the Gaza Strip.
Well, yeah, that's interesting, of course.
I mean, when somebody is responsible for an international military alliance that doesn't have any legitimate function anymore, they go searching for enemies and searching for missions.
And that's one of the things that popped up, obviously.
Yeah, this is a sign of a desperate organization and a desperate bunch of bureaucrats.
And just for anybody in the audience who's kind of new to this and not too familiar with the situation in the Gaza Strip, that would be absolute insanity.
I think that's just a fact.
That's not really an opinion or a valued judgment.
That's just the truth.
Well, of course, I mean, these are people who, you know, their main mission after the end of the Soviet Union was Kosovo.
And that was a completely air war mission, which we now know much more clearly, I think, was in many ways a disaster.
It didn't solve anything.
It killed a lot of people.
It destroyed a lot of things and left a legacy that we still have to deal with.
But, you know, it was a make-work project for NATO.
And from there, they were continuing to look for something else because they knew that wasn't going to be enough.
Well, yeah.
And so, you know, in fact, leaving aside Afghanistan for a minute, really ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, or maybe, you know, still early 90s anyway, these guys really realized what a threat they were under, kind of.
And I remember reading, and remember that great article, Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels that was in Playboy by Richard Cummings?
Right.
And he talks about how Bruce Jackson, and he was a senior vice president at Lockheed Martin, said, hey, we have to set up the committee on NATO expansion.
And then the whole thing was coming up with reasons why Americans ought to believe that they need to bring Latvia and Estonia and Poland and every country up to Russia's borders, into NATO.
And it was simply, from their point of view, getting rid of some airplanes, man.
Well, yeah.
I mean, of course, there were self-interested people in the private sector who were very much allied with the bureaucrats in NATO and who were sort of the point of their spear politically in the United States to generate support for more NATO missions, new NATO missions.
And the whole idea that we have to push NATO up to the borders of Russia, of the Russian Federation, was certainly a major part of that strategy.
And this is another serious problem that we still have not worked out, the conflict between the self-interested NATO bureaucrats and the interests of the United States, certainly, and most of the countries in Europe, which are at least some major allies of the United States who were very suspicious and very skeptical about what the United States wanted to do in the case of Georgia and some of the other states that were being pushed towards NATO, into NATO, and threatening the stability of that part of the world.
And now, look, NATO is not just some acronym.
This means that if Putin wakes up on the wrong side of the bed in the morning and decides he wants to take back a few of the former Soviet republics, then the American people are signed up to all die in hydrogen bomb attacks in a full-scale war with Russia to protect Latvia and Estonia.
Yeah, I mean, there is a potential ticking time bomb there, no question about it.
And that's what NATO means.
This is the alliance.
It says, we'll trade New York for whatever the capital of Estonia is Right, right.
And this is a huge national security issue that has never been seriously debated, as it should have been in this country.
No question about it.
So now, how is this working out in the European capitals?
You know, there was that great WikiLeaks thing where the CIA was saying that in order to BS the European populations into going along with the war, we need to sell the Germans on the idea that we must live up to our NATO obligations.
America, man, and to the French, we need to sell them on women's rights, etc.
They have real problems in, I guess, was it Sweden, where the government fell and was replaced by a government that probably took their troops out of there, right?
Or, no?
You mean, I think you mean Netherlands.
Yeah, yeah, that is what I was saying, because I knew that wasn't right about Sweden as soon as I said it, but I couldn't think of what I was right about.
Netherlands has certainly been one of the countries that was on the cusp here in terms of being very, very wary, not just wary, but opposed to going into Afghanistan for any combat purpose.
They made it very clear, the parliament of the Netherlands, the Dutch parliament, has been very aggressive in insisting that their troops not be put in harm's way in Afghanistan.
Their troops should not be put in position of combat action.
And what happened was, eventually, that they did indeed go into combat in Afghanistan, despite the expressed desire of the popular representatives of the people of the Netherlands to the opposite.
All right, well, when we get back, we'll talk about how hard it's going to be for them to keep this up, those European politicians.
It's Gareth Porter from Interpress Service.
Antiwar.com/Porter.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Worden.
I'm talking with Gareth Porter from Interpress Service and Antiwar.com.
And he's making the case here that a big part, maybe the dominant part of the motivation for continuing the Afghan war at this point is to make sure that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has an excuse to continue to exist.
Since, as we all know, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin destroyed the Soviet Union, or at least presided over its demise a generation ago.
So, anyway, you have some really great quotes in here and research that you did and sources of your own here.
I was wondering if you thought that I ought to give you some more time to make your case here, Gareth.
Sure, I can elaborate a bit more and sort of delineate what some of the thinking was that went into the policy that was adopted by the George W. Bush administration of basically turning over the responsibility for Afghanistan to NATO in a formal sense and to a significant degree in a genuine sense that the George W. Bush administration was expecting NATO to really take over primary responsibility and allow U.S. troops to then, of course, be sent to Iraq, which is what the Bush administration really wanted.
And one of the key points here is that it was precisely the obsession of the Bush administration with Iraq that allowed the NATO bureaucrats in Washington and in Brussels the opportunity to basically grab the spotlight for NATO in Afghanistan to give NATO this new mission in Afghanistan because otherwise there's no way that, you know, if there was a serious concern about the security of Afghanistan, you would never give it to NATO.
It just wouldn't have happened.
And so, you know, one of the things that it's important to understand here is that the NATO bureaucrats, particularly those in Washington, what they were aiming at here was not just to give NATO a new mission, although that was the beginning point, that they had to give it something more than it had at that point to justify its existence.
But what they were hoping for was that by bringing them into Afghanistan and having them stay for a long time and carry out quasi-military mission there, they could use that to promote the kind of NATO that the United States wanted in the future, which was an organization that would be more strongly supportive of U.S. hegemony in the Middle East particularly, but through the wide arc of instability throughout Central Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa.
So the idea was that we would, and this was articulated quite explicitly by General Carl Eikenberry after he left Afghanistan as commander of U.S. troops there and became the chief deputy general and the chief deputy chairman of the NATO Military Committee in 2007.
He testified before Congress and what he said was that we want NATO to be reformed so that it will be tougher, meaner, and more militarized than it is today.
And what they were hoping would happen was that they could use the combat deployment of NATO member countries in Afghanistan as a basis for pushing each of these NATO member countries to do more militarily, to have a larger military budget, to devote more money, resources to readiness, and in other ways to up the ante so that NATO would be in a stronger position to support all kinds of U.S. interventions throughout that part of the world.
So it was really quite an interesting, explicit description of a policy that was using NATO deployments in Afghanistan as part of a longer-term scheme to turn NATO into the kind of organization that the military and the Pentagon thought would be useful for a long-term U.S. role in the world.
So that's one point that I make in the article.
But I think perhaps more relevant, because it really gets closer to the bone of reality about what actually happened in Afghanistan, is the dishonest way in which the NATO bureaucrats, both in Brussels and in Washington, portrayed the situation in Afghanistan and sold this mission to NATO member countries as just mopping up for the successful military operation of the United States on the assumption that there would not be any rise of the Taliban, no return of the Taliban in any serious manner in Afghanistan.
And I quote General Jones on a 2004 trip to Afghanistan as telling Armed Forces, the press service, I think it was, that we should not even think about the possibility of a rising of the Taliban, that this is not going to happen, that this is only going to be a mopping-up operation.
And of course, that's the way it was presented to the member countries in 2003, 2004 and even 2005.
And so just to carry that point to its logical conclusion, in December 2005, at the very time when General Eikenberry, the commander of US troops in Afghanistan and the newly appointed US ambassador to Afghanistan, Ronald Newman, were in agreement that the situation was deteriorating very seriously and they had strong suspicions that the Taliban were positioning themselves for a big push and that they were indeed planning to come back.
Nevertheless, you have General Eikenberry telling the press in early December 2005 that the situation is under control, there's nothing to worry about, and basically saying the opposite of what he was reporting back to Washington.
And of course, this is again still part of this process of selling to the NATO member countries the idea that they should put more troops into Afghanistan and trying to avoid a serious crisis.
Yeah, but none of those European politicians are buying that today, right?
Everybody knows, as well as the audience of this show, that this war is already lost.
Absolutely.
I mean, of course, in 2006 you had a major Taliban offensive beginning in the early spring and essentially Eikenberry had to eat his words because there was just no credibility attached to anything like that kind of message.
And from then on, the fat was really in the fire.
The United States was criticizing the NATO member countries for not putting more troops in.
Well, so, can they be expected to stay at all?
Are they all on their way out now?
Except us.
I think there's no doubt that they are all on their way out.
It's just a matter of time.
There's really nobody who's committed with the United States in theory, at least, to this long-term occupation of Afghanistan.
Right.
And yet, at the same time, I mean, you're referring kind of there implying that America is staying, no matter what.
And I guess they're already disavowing the official position.
Whether they can actually get away with that, that's another question.
We'll have to see about that.
Indeed.
All right, well, thank you very much for your time on the show today, Gareth.
My pleasure.
I appreciate it.
Everybody, that's the great Gareth Porter, author of the book Perils of Dominance about Vietnam, journalist at Interpress Service,
